From Russia With Love: Putin Says His Spy Net Never Meant to Hurt Us

Is this the face of a woman who would cause you any pain, America? Vladimir Putin would like you to know that Anna Chapman and her network of sleeper agents in the United States weren’t there to cause harm; they just wanted to talk.

Last night, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made an appearance on CNN”s “Larry King Live,” where he tried to downplay the importance and intentions of the Russian spy network that had hid in the United States for years until its unraveling last summer. So what were they trying to do? Like a fire extinguisher, they were only to be used in a time of “crisis,” according to the Putin.

“They had their own tasks to address,” Putin told Larry King. “They are involved in the clandestine activities, the main purpose of which is to be actively involved during the crisis times and when the diplomatic ties are suspended, when other means of intelligence service are not efficient or sometimes are not possible.”

“As I said it before, I can repeat it again, with activities, they didn’t cause any harm to the interests of the United States of America,” Putin claimed.

That’s doesn’t entirely square with the record, though.

For instance, it’s hard to see how selling spyware to the private intelligence firm Stratfor (as Russian spy Don Heathfield allegedly attempted) would position Russia to have an emergency diplomatic back-channel.

But one could be forgiven for thinking the Russian spooks were dormant on purpose, given how little information they seem to have collected. Despite the fact that some of the spies had been in the United States since as early as the 1990s, it’s not clear that any of them managed to steal any actual secrets. Their poor tradecraft probably didn’t help matters and likely indicates Moscow didn’t exactly have its top talent in the spy ring. The spies’ use of cold-war era burst communications techniques to communicate with their handlers also reportedly made them easy prey for the FBI’s eavesdroppers. One of the agents, Juan Lazaro, got in trouble with his handlers for failing to identify the sources of information in his reports — a problem he was advised to fix by attributing the information to random U.S. politicians.

Putin’s “time of crisis” explanation was likely just another face-saving way Russia to address the embarrassing espionage scandal — in addition to the fishy stories Russian government officials have been floating about mysterious traitorcolonels betraying the spy network instead of their own bumbling.

But it wouldn’t have been a Larry King interview without a few softball human interest questions thrown in. In the interview, we learned that the Russian prime minister likes to sing songs in English in order to improve his language skills. “That’s like a game. It’s not even like doing any studies,” Putin says. He’s actually quite the chanteur, as evidenced by his KGB song sing-along with Chapman and her pals once they were swapped back to Russia. Sadly though, Putin did not delight viewers, American Idol-style, to a sampling of his vocal stylings.